What prompted you to switch from investment banking to public policy? Talk us through your background before PRS.

CV: I started like any other good south Indian student. I graduated with a civil engineering degree from the BMS College of Engineering. In my 3^rd year, I realized that I wanted to do an MBA and later was admitted to the University of Houston, where I specialized in Finance.

After my MBA, I decided to come back to India and started working with ICICI Securities. I had an excellent 3-year run in what was then one of the most sought after companies. While I was with ICICI, I met with several non-profit institutions during the weekends. I understood their work and also began to ponder on how these non-profit institutions could be scaled up across larger geographies.

This is when I discovered Pratham, which was a couple of months old when I approached them. I started volunteering with Pratham even when I was with ICICI. I was later seconded by ICICI to work with Pratham full time, where I worked for nearly 3 years. The Government of Karnataka wanted to replicate the Pratham model in Karnataka. This led to the setting up of Akshara Foundation. Nandan and Rohini Nilekani, Rajeev Chandrashekar, Texas Instruments and other corporates came forward to support this initiative.

It was at this time that Mr. Azim Premji wanted to know if I could move to Bangalore to help set up the Azim Premji Foundation.

I spent 3 years in Bangalore, after which I left for Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where I completed my Masters in Public Administration. I joined the World Bank after my MPA and worked there for 2 years after which I came back to Delhi to set up PRS.

How did the idea of setting up PRS come about?

CV: All along even before I started with Pratham, I had a fetish for scale. I was always fascinated by scale and thought about solutions on a PAN India basis. Scale to me meant a couple of different things - one was scale in implementation; the other was scale through public policy work. Policy was always on the back of my mind no matter the kind of work I was involved in the past. There was a lot of scope to work on policies in the education sector and other social sectors. A lot of the policies that we feel the impact of today depend on how the policy is conceived and implemented.

Our MPs who make policy cannot be experts in all the issues that come up before the Parliament. The range of issues before the Parliament is too diverse for any Parliamentarian to understand the nuances of a Bill or an Act in greater detail. Further, in our system, we do not have research staff for Parliamentarians. Our MPs need better research tools to take more informed decisions on issues of law and policy. This is how the PRS idea originated.

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